Owner

Current status

The necessary systemd infrastructure has landed in rawhide with the systemd 183 release.
The PackageKit and GNOME pieces are still being developed.

Detailed Description

By "offline" OS updates we mean package installations and updates that are run with the system booted into a special system update mode, in order to avoid problems related to conflicts of libraries and services that are currently running with those on disk.

Note that this feature does not prevent you from using yum to install updates whenever you want to. We also differentiate updates of 'OS components' (which we want to do in this offline fashion) from application updates and installations, which should still be possible from the UI without restarting the system.

Benefit to Fedora

Replacing libraries and files while the OS is running can cause problems ranging from application crashes to inconsistent system states where processes are using different versions of a library at the same time. By installing system updates 'outside' the normal system operation, we avoid these problems.

Secondary benefits of the work done for this feature include that we are downloading all updates before we notify the user about available updates,
and thus avoid unpleasant wait times.

Scope

Complete the PackageKit support for offline updates (mostly done upstream)

Update gnome-packagekit to support offline updates

Update gnome-shell to offer 'Install updates and restart' when updates are available ([#677394])